Such stencils, to which printing dye can be applied with the aid of a squeegee or a roller, are conventionally designed as silk screens surrounded by rectangular frames to which they are attached on all sides. These horizontal frames, generally of steel, usually are about 5 cm high and therefore take up considerable space in stacking. The connection between the screen and the frame must be permanent since otherwise shifts may occur in the pattern which are particularly troublesome if that pattern is for one color component of a multicolor composite design.
Attempts have already been made to replace these silk screens by apertured sheet-metal foils, e.g. of nickel or steel, with a thickness of several tenths of a millimeter. Such foils are dimensionally stable and can therefore be interchangeably clamped in a mounting frame; their stacking requires only a fraction of the space needed for a corresponding number of silk screens. A drawback of these printing foils, however, resides in their lack of elasticity whereby even minor irregularities in the clamping pressure give rise to creases which mar the pattern and prevent the use of the stencil for printing.